How do you find a soulmate – without a soul?Deva Rainsong was meant to be nothing more than a vessel to house the enemy’s soul. Bred in a lab with a link to the enemy’s bloodline, she is a mix of all four higher races and the only creature of her kind. No one, not even her family, knows how she works, or what she is truly capable of. And now, with the death of the enemy in the last war, Deva has lost her purpose. Despite the deep connection she forms with five men along her journey, love without a soul can only be an empty affair. Deva refuses to bind any man to that meaningless existence.

Unclaimed, empty, and soulless, Deva has been left with nothing but a deep, cold longing for a love that Fate will never offer. But, when Fate hounds begin hunting members of the bloodline, it becomes Deva’s personal quest to find out how to stop them. With her special link, and her five suitors in tow, she is in a singularly unique position. Together, the band of six will embark on a mission to uncover the secrets of bloodline souls, love, rogue Fate hounds, and the true extent of Deva’s powers…

Warning: this story is a fast-burn HOT and steamy reverse-harem odyssey, with some M/M content, not meant for the faint of heart (or libido)… #whychoose!

Choose between the dirtier excerpt & the less dirty excerpt…or maybe you want to read both – be my guest!

Dirty excerpt:

A hot gust of dragon breath billowed over me and when I regained my senses I looked up into a scaled snout and golden eyes the size of dinner plates with bottomless black slits for pupils. More sounds of breaking furniture surrounded me as the dragon situated himself and tilted his head. His pupils widened to almost full black orbs as his snout nudged my bare thigh and I became acutely aware of my relative lack of clothing.

“Can you get up?” Keagan grunted beneath me.

I moved my foot to try to gain purchase, but sank into a pillow and slipped beyond, getting caught inside whatever broken piece of furniture we’d landed on.

Rohan’s head tilted the other way and his snout nudged higher up my thigh, inhaling deeply. A low, seismic rumble filled the room as he caged my already trapped leg with one big claw and darted out his forked tongue. I glanced around but we were boxed in by smashed furniture, and Rohan’s big forelegs blocked any escape.

“I think we’re stuck,” I said, and gasped when Rohan’s tongue flicked close to my core.

Keagan’s fingers squeezed my waist. “Then we’d better make the most of it,” he rumbled. “Trust me, Deva. This isn’t the first time I’ve dealt with him in this state.

He’s kind of an irresponsible jackass, but I love him anyway.”

“Does he usually destroy the house?”

Keagan’s chest shook with a low laugh against my back. “This is a first. The Maestro’s going to be livid, but we’ll deal with him later. First things first.” His hands slipped down to my hips and grazed the naked skin beneath the hem of Rohan’s shirt. “I’m going to take this off you.

Naked . . . ah . . . female flesh is better than clothed, yeah? At least I’m hoping he’s as enthralled with your tits uncovered as he was when you were dressed.”

“He was enthralled?” I managed to squeak out just as a big claw hooked the collar of the shirt and swiped down, preempting Keagan’s undressing of me by slicing the shirt straight down the center. An interested rumble echoed through the room as Rohan raised his snout and nudged between my breasts, inhaling softly.

Keagan snorted. “Case in point. You do have fantastic breasts.”

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Less dirty excerpt (First chapter opening):

The ursa claim that when they go on their pilgrimage as young adults, they do this thing they call “soul searching.” I’ve always wondered what this meant. Are their souls like vessels that need to be emptied out like old luggage and filtered through to find clues to their true path in life? Or are they missing their souls and the pilgrimage is how they find them?

I’ve never asked anyone else this question before because I kind of already know the answer. Their soul searching was a journey to understand the souls they already possessed.

I’d have liked to think that my own pilgrimage was the same thing, except I was probably fooling myself.

First of all, I’m not really on a pilgrimage at all. I ran away from home and my family is probably looking for me.

And second, I don’t have a soul, which is a double-edged sword. It means I’m nearly impossible for my family to find, but it also means I am missing the one thing that could probably tell me where I belong in the world, and I’m fairly certain my own quest isn’t going to lead me to it.

Ever since I ran, I’ve been going through the motions of this so-called “soul search,” but haven’t really learned a whole lot about myself that I didn’t already know. I’m an infinitely adaptable creature and a quick study, yet the powers I was born with are still wimpy as fuck. Three weeks into a self-imposed exile from the life I knew, all I’d really learned were things related to the human world to which I’d fled.

Humanity was both amazingly resilient and heart-breakingly fragile at the same time. I finally understood why the higher races were so drawn to them. Why the dragons used to collect human mates and hoard them like treasure.

That particular instinct wasn’t exactly dormant in me.

Thanks to my somewhat unorthodox origins, I was magically linked to a special segment of humanity that was infused with divine blood. And thanks to that blood, there was something distinctly magical hurting some of the humans of the bloodline.

My deepest instincts urged me to protect them. Whether it was my dragon nature at work, or a trait of one of the other four races that ran in my blood, I kind of wanted to take half the bloodline home with me just to keep them safe. That would have solved a lot of issues, but it wasn’t exactly feasible to show up in the Dragon Glade or one of the other three sacred homes of the four higher races with a whole pile of humans in tow.

Even if I could go home. One of the few things I’d learned about myself was that I was stubborn as hell. I was part human, so that resilience and tenacity was there, but I was also immortal, so not so fragile, at least not on the outside.

I couldn’t leave the human world until I’d figured out what was hurting the people I was linked to and why, even if it meant keeping watch over the one thing they possessed that I didn’t: their souls.

Ophelia Bell loves a good bad-boy and especially strong women in her stories. Women who aren't apologetic about enjoying sex and bad boys who don't mind being with a woman who's in charge, at least on the surface, because pretty much anything goes in the bedroom.

Ophelia grew up on a rural farm in North Carolina and now lives in Los Angeles with her own tattooed bad-boy husband and four attention-whoring cats.